Future of Life Institute Podcast
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit working to reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies. In particular, FLI focuses on risks from artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, nuclear weapons and climate change. The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions. FLI has become one of the world's leading voices on the governance of AI having created one of the earliest and most influential sets of governance principles: the Asilomar AI Principles.
Episodes
May 26, 2023 • 102 mins
Roman Yampolskiy joins the podcast to discuss various objections to AI safety, impossibility results for AI, and how much risk civilization should accept from emerging technologies. You can read more about Roman's work at http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/
Timestamps:
00:00 Objections to AI safety
15:06 Will robots make AI risks salient?
27:51 Was early AI safety research useful?
37:28 Impossibility results for AI
47:25 How much...
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May 11, 2023 • 66 mins
Nathan Labenz joins the podcast to discuss the economic effects of AI on growth, productivity, and employment. We also talk about whether AI might have catastrophic effects on the world. You can read more about Nathan's work at https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai
Timestamps:
00:00 Economic transformation from AI
11:15 Productivity increases from technology
17:44 AI effects on employment
28:43 Life without jobs
38:42 Losing co...
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Nathan Labenz joins the podcast to discuss the cognitive revolution, his experience red teaming GPT-4, and the potential near-term dangers of AI. You can read more about Nathan's work at
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai
Timestamps:
00:00 The cognitive revolution
07:47 Red teaming GPT-4
24:00 Coming to believe in transformative AI
30:14 Is AI depth or breadth most impressive?
42:52 Potential near-term dangers from AI
Soc...
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April 27, 2023 • 77 mins
Maryanna Saenko joins the podcast to discuss how venture capital works, how to fund innovation, and what the fields of investing and philanthropy could learn from each other. You can read more about Maryanna's work at https://future.ventures
Timestamps:
00:00 How does venture capital work?
09:01 Failure and success for startups
13:22 Is overconfidence necessary?
19:20 Repeat entrepreneurs
24:38 Long-term investing
30:36 Fee...
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April 20, 2023 • 52 mins
Connor Leahy joins the podcast to discuss the state of the AI. Which labs are in front? Which alignment solutions might work? How will the public react to more capable AI? You can read more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev
Timestamps:
00:00 Landscape of AI research labs
10:13 Is AGI a useful term?
13:31 AI predictions
17:56 Reinforcement learning from human feedback
29:53 Mechanistic interpretability
33:37 Yudko...
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April 13, 2023 • 96 mins
Connor Leahy joins the podcast to discuss GPT-4, magic, cognitive emulation, demand for human-like AI, and aligning superintelligence. You can read more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev
Timestamps:
00:00 GPT-4
16:35 "Magic" in machine learning
27:43 Cognitive emulations
38:00 Machine learning VS explainability
48:00 Human data = human AI?
1:00:07 Analogies for cognitive emulations
1:26:03 Demand for human-like ...
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April 6, 2023 • 50 mins
Lennart Heim joins the podcast to discuss options for governing the compute used by AI labs and potential problems with this approach to AI safety. You can read more about Lennart's work here: https://heim.xyz/about/
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:37 AI risk
03:33 Why focus on compute?
11:27 Monitoring compute
20:30 Restricting compute
26:54 Subsidising compute
34:00 Compute as a bottleneck
38:41 US and China
42:14 Unin...
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March 30, 2023 • 47 mins
Lennart Heim joins the podcast to discuss how we can forecast AI progress by researching AI hardware. You can read more about Lennart's work here: https://heim.xyz/about/
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:00 The AI triad
06:26 Modern chip production
15:54 Forecasting AI with compute
27:18 Running out of data?
32:37 Three eras of AI training
37:58 Next chip paradigm
44:21 AI takeoff speeds
Social Media Links:
➡️ WEBSITE: ...
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March 23, 2023 • 51 mins
Liv Boeree joins the podcast to discuss poker, GPT-4, human-AI interaction, whether this is the most important century, and building a dataset of human wisdom. You can read more about Liv's work here: https://livboeree.com
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:36 AI in Poker
09:35 Game-playing AI
13:45 GPT-4 and generative AI
26:41 Human-AI interaction
32:05 AI arms race risks
39:32 Most important century?
42:36 Diminishing ret...
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March 16, 2023 • 42 mins
Liv Boeree joins the podcast to discuss Moloch, beauty filters, game theory, institutional change, and artificial intelligence. You can read more about Liv's work here: https://livboeree.com
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:57 What is Moloch?
04:13 Beauty filters
10:06 Science citations
15:18 Resisting Moloch
20:51 New institutions
26:02 Moloch and WinWin
28:41 Changing systems
33:37 Artificial intelligence
39:14 AI ac...
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March 9, 2023 • 43 mins
Tobias Baumann joins the podcast to discuss suffering risks, space colonization, and cooperative artificial intelligence. You can read more about Tobias' work here: https://centerforreducingsuffering.org.
Timestamps:
00:00 Suffering risks
02:50 Space colonization
10:12 Moral circle expansion
19:14 Cooperative artificial intelligence
36:19 Influencing governments
39:34 Can we reduce suffering?
Social Media Links:
➡️ WEBSI...
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March 2, 2023 • 47 mins
Tobias Baumann joins the podcast to discuss suffering risks, artificial sentience, and the problem of knowing which actions reduce suffering in the long-term future. You can read more about Tobias' work here: https://centerforreducingsuffering.org.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:52 What are suffering risks?
05:40 Artificial sentience
17:18 Is reducing suffering hopelessly difficult?
26:06 Can we know how to reduce sufferi...
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February 23, 2023 • 34 mins
Neel Nanda joins the podcast for a lightning round on mathematics, technological progress, aging, living up to our values, and generative AI. You can find his blog here: https://www.neelnanda.io
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:55 How useful is advanced mathematics?
02:24 Will AI replace mathematicians?
03:28 What are the key drivers of tech progress?
04:13 What scientific discovery would disrupt Neel's worldview?
05:59 How...
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February 16, 2023 • 61 mins
Neel Nanda joins the podcast to talk about mechanistic interpretability and how it can make AI safer. Neel is an independent AI safety researcher. You can find his blog here: https://www.neelnanda.io
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:46 How early is the field mechanistic interpretability?
03:12 Why should we care about mechanistic interpretability?
06:38 What are some successes in mechanistic interpretability?
16:29 How promi...
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February 9, 2023 • 64 mins
Neel Nanda joins the podcast to explain how we can understand neural networks using mechanistic interpretability. Neel is an independent AI safety researcher. You can find his blog here: https://www.neelnanda.io
Timestamps:
00:00 Who is Neel?
04:41 How did Neel choose to work on AI safety?
12:57 What does an AI safety researcher do?
15:53 How analogous are digital neural networks to brains?
21:34 Are neural networks like alie...
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February 2, 2023 • 65 mins
Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast for a lightning round on a variety of topics ranging from aliens to education. Learn more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev
Social Media Links:
➡️ WEBSITE: https://futureoflife.org
➡️ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FLIxrisk
➡️ INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/futureoflifeinstitute/
➡️ META: https://www.facebook.com/futureoflifeinstitute
➡️ LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin....
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January 26, 2023 • 65 mins
Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI safety, the fragility of the world, slowing down AI development, regulating AI, and the optimal funding model for AI safety research. Learn more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:47 What is the best way to understand AI safety?
09:50 Why is the world relatively stable?
15:18 Is the main worry human misuse of AI?
22:47 Ca...
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January 19, 2023 • 64 mins
Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI progress, chimps, memes, and markets. Learn more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Defining artificial general intelligence
04:52 What makes humans more powerful than chimps?
17:23 Would AIs have to be social to be intelligent?
20:29 Importing humanity's memes into AIs
23:07 How do we measure progress in AI?
42:39 ...
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January 12, 2023 • 36 mins
On this special episode of the podcast, Emilia Javorsky interviews Sean Ekins about regulating AI drug discovery.
Timestramps:
00:00 Introduction
00:31 Ethical guidelines and regulation of AI drug discovery
06:11 How do we balance innovation and safety in AI drug discovery?
13:12 Keeping dangerous chemical data safe
21:16 Sean’s personal story of voicing concerns about AI drug discovery
32:06 How Sean will continue working on ...
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January 5, 2023 • 39 mins
On this special episode of the podcast, Emilia Javorsky interviews Sean Ekins about the dangers of AI drug discovery. They talk about how Sean discovered an extremely toxic chemical (VX) by reversing an AI drug discovery algorithm.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:46 Sean’s professional journey
03:45 Can computational models replace animal models?
07:24 The risks of AI drug discovery
12:48 Should scientists disclose dangerous...
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